With the increased usage of digital storage of media items such as photographs, videos and other electronic documents, methods of browsing and retrieving these digitally stored items have been developed. A common operation, when interacting with devices which give access to media items in a collection, is to search by browsing. Thumbnail images (hereafter “thumbnails”), which may be graphical or bitmap, corresponding to media items are presented on a display device and the user may choose between different thumbnails using an input device which may contain buttons or a scroll-wheel. Whilst thumbnails are often associated with image data to be display or reproduced, they can also be associated with other data, such a stored telephone number in a mobile telephone handset, or a sound file, where the thumbnail may be an album cover or something else associated with musical content. As more thumbnails may be present in the collection than will fit or otherwise be able to be displayed on the display device at the same time, a mechanism is usually incorporated to allow the displayed thumbnails to be replaced with new ones from the collection.
As it may be hard to discern the contents of the thumbnails in view of their relatively small size and the typical small size portable display on which they are often presented, it is common for a copy of the selected thumbnail to be shown at a larger size as a “preview” image. This allows the user to inspect the image in more detail. This approach also has the benefit of allowing the user to fix or focus their gaze on the larger image whilst scrolling through the thumbnails. The preview image is repeatedly updated with new images for efficient browsing. When the user wishes to check adjacent images, scrolling can be stopped and the adjacent thumbnails inspected.
One problem with these interfaces is that significant processing is required to update the thumbnail information. When scrolling, many thumbnails may need to be updated for each user action. If a scrolling animation is used, this may require significant computing resources. Embedded devices such as digital cameras or printers, which incorporate LCD displays, may use low cost processors with limited capabilities which can exacerbate this problem.
Another problem is that scrolling causes all the thumbnails to move. This may be visually distracting for the user.